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gerald kersh

Friday, 06 September 2013

Pity the poor comic novel. Although, as has
often been remarked, it is usually treated as ‘light’ and less important than
novels dealing with tragic themes, it is much more difficult to pull off
successfully. This is, I suppose, because we can all pretty much agree on what
constitutes horror or sorrow, but what we consider funny is much more
idiosyncratic. So before you consider my encomium to Fowlers End you should know that I was not amused by The Diary of a Nobody, that I enjoyed Cold Comfort Farm but all that tidying-up of the Starkadders etc.
made me feel uneasy and that the only time I ever went to see A Comedy of Errors I could hardly
forbear from leaping up and shouting ‘They’re TWINS let’s all go home now.’
Conversely I laughed like a drain all the way through A Confederacy of Dunces and start to giggle just thinking of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (it’s not
fiction, strictly speaking, but yet I feel it loiters on that
fiction/non-fiction border).

Fowlers
End is a novel to describe which the word ‘rumbustious’ was
surely invented. The characters are all crazy grotesques but the humour is in the
language, Kersh’s narrator, Daniel Laverock, likes to pile it on to greater and greater extremes, like eiderdowns on a bed until it nears collapse.
Fowlers End itself is a (made-up) suburb of London, which at the period of the novel
(1930s) looks something like this:

Fowlers
End is a special kind of tundra that supports nothing gracious in the way of flora
and fauna. Plant a cabbage here in this soured, embittered, dyspeptic,
ulcerated soil, and up comes a kind of bleached shillelagh with spikes on its
knob. Plant a family, a respectable working-class family, and in two
generations it will turn out wolves. [...] There is a High Street about a
hundred yards long, and the most woebegone railway terminal on the face of the
earth where, with a dismal and sinister smashing and groaning of shunting
locomotives, all that is most unserviceable in the way of rolling stock comes
in with coal and sulphur, scrap iron and splintery timber, and goes away with the
stuff they make in the Fowlers End Factories. [...] There is a sulphuric-acid
factory which looks like a Brobdingnagian assembly of alchemical apparatus out
of a pulp writer’s nightmare as it sprawls under a cloud of yellow and black
that shudders and stings like a dying wasp between great hills of green-black
and grey-mauve slag.

Most of the characters share Laverock’s
relish for language but abuse it frightfully. The worst offender is Sam
Yudenow, owner of the Pantheon cinema which Laverock has
been engaged to manage. Yudenow’s speech is peppered with puns, intended and
unintended, manglings and malapropisms, combining Yiddish and Cockney
inflections, it’s wonderful. He describes the inhabitants of Fowlers End thus:

‘Thieves
and drunkards. They’d steal the rings from under their mothers’ eyes. The milk
out of your tea they’d pinch. Last time I had the painters in, my worst enemies
shouldn’t go through what I went through with these stinkpots. Day and night I
watched this ’ere show, and even so the louse-bound low-lifes knocked off a
five-gallon drum walnut varnish stain. Drunk it up, the swine. One old woman
died from it. It only goes to show you what they are – a lot of rotters. The
salt of the earth, mind you, only bad to the backbone. Turn your back five
minutes and they strip the place to the bone. You got to keep on the toes of
your feet. Only last week there was trouble in the laventry. A woman stands up
on the wet seat to pinch the electric light bulb and electrocutes herself. That’s
show biz for you. You got to keep your eye out for things like that. It’s not
their fault. It’s the capitalistic system – too soft with the bastards. Unions!
The velvet ’and in the iron glove I’d give ’em, miv knobs on. [...]’

Copper Baldwin, a colleague of Laverock’s and
indispensible to the Pantheon, is another Cockney, fizzing with Marxism and
literary criticism. Over a beer in the dank ‘Load of Mischief’, Baldwin holds forth
about the canon:

‘[Dickens]
ain’t true, ’e ain’t real. And don’t give me all that stuff about ’aving met
Dickensian characters. I know you ’ave, the same way you’ve met Gloria Swanson,
or King George, or Jesus Christ in the Old Kent Road. Give the stinking rabble
something to copy – that’s all – and there you are: “true to life”, as they
say. ’Umbug! People like Dickens aren’t true to life – life is true to Charles
Dickens. And that goes for that poor bastard William Shakespeare too – though I
admit ’e done ’is best within ’is limitations.’

Tolstoy and his fellow Russians are fools, ‘Zola
got it all out of the newspapers’, but Dickens receives Baldwin’s special
contempt. As Kersh is well aware, everyone in Fowlers End is vulnerable to the adjective ‘Dickensian’ and he is
vulnerable to Baldwin’s dislike of middle-class authors writing about the
working class, so it’s hard not to see this pleasurable diatribe as not
including himself. Indeed, through Copper Baldwin, he seems intent on reminding
us that this is a novel, an extension of Gerald Kersh and not real, but that it
is dangerous because people will model themselves on the characters. Thus
fiction changes the world. And then he laughs about it.

In amongst Chinese contortionists, punch-ups
with local thugs, phantom pregnancies, bomb-making anarchists and vendettas
against Godbolt’s Emporium lurks a plot. The Pantheon’s pianist is Miss Noel,
ruined by alcoholism but recognised by Laverock as having real talent. After his
arrangements for her talents to be recognised are ruthlessly sabotaged by
Yudenow, Laverock plots revenge on his boss via an investment scam. The novel
teeters on the edge of becoming a criticism of capitalism, under whose
influence the poor rot in the cancerous squalor of industrial wasteland and are filled with self-loathing, but I
think never quite reaches it. Kersh can’t keep a straight face for long enough,
and he is too fond of his characters, even the cruel Yudenow, and too easily
diverted by them.

You may not have heard of Fowlers End before, but if you think
you might like it – and Anthony Burgess, Simon Raven, Angela Carter and Michael
Moorcock are among its fans so it’s not just me with my Grossmith deviancy, there are people with taste who admire it – you can find second-hand copies of it quite
cheaply and it has just been reissued. And there’s a longer and better discussion of Fowlers Endhere.